Thomas’ Trinitarian account of creation has not only a Christological but a pneumatological dimension, Emery argues. Thomas’ Augustinian pneumatology is rooted in his recognition that within the “God who loves himself,” there is a God who is loved and a love that is God. Especially in his later work, he works out a dynamic conception of the Spirit as love. Love is no longer “a kind of informing of the will by the good,” but an “affection toward” ( affici ad aliquid ), an “impulsion” ( impulsio , impulsus ), an “attraction” ( attractio ), and an impression ( impressio ).

The last of these is especially intriguing:

“In the will of the one who is engaged in the act of loving, [Thomas] discerns . . . a dynamic presence of the object loved: the being that I love is present to my will, bending me, as it were, in his direction.” Love is a kind of dynamic perichoresis.

From this, Thomas works out his conception of the Spirit as love: “It is hence this affection, impression, or impulsion of love that constitutes henceforth the preferred approach to understanding the person of the Holy Spirit. The procession of the Holy Spirit is the spiration, in God, of that impression or impulsion of love by which God loved is present in God who loves himself. It is thus that the Spirit of love is Love as person (personal Love). The Spirit proceeds precisely in the mode of the love by which God loves his own goodness.” And this love is the driving force behind creation and redemption: “The creative and redemptive action of God has as its reason ( ratio ) the will by which God loves his own goodness.”

Because the Spirit as Love “encompasses a force of impulsion, a motive power,” creation is creation by the Spirit: “not only the creation but the entire divine economy is placed under the dynamic action of the Spirit.” This includes “providence, the divine government of the world, life, charity which causes human beings to resemble God by giving them divine friendship, revelation, prophecy, the keeping of the commandments, the road toward eternal beatitude, the forgiveness of sins and the renewal of hearts, contemplation, consolation, the spiritual freedom of the children of God.”

Thomas himself writes, “Even as the Father utters himself and every creature by the Word he begets, inasmuch as the Word begotten completely expresses the Father and every creature, so also he loves himself and every creature by the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as the Holy Spirit proceeds as Love for the primal goodness by whom the Father loves himself and every creature” (ST 1, 37, 2).